Currency Calculator

This currency calculator converts between 20 currencies using rates that refresh automatically each day, so you do not have to type a rate in yourself. Enter an amount, pick the two currencies, and it shows the conversion both ways along with the rate and its inverse. The figures are mid-market rates, the midpoint between what buyers and sellers are quoting on the wholesale market, which is the number to measure every other offer against.

The words you need

A handful of terms cover almost everything written about exchange rates:

• Exchange rate: the value of one currency expressed in another.
• Currency pair: the two currencies being compared, written EUR/USD. The first is the base currency and always equals 1; the second is the quote currency.
• Bid price: what a buyer will pay for a unit of the base currency.
• Ask price: what a seller will accept for it. The ask is always the higher of the two.
• Spread: the gap between bid and ask. That gap is the dealer's margin, and it is where most of the cost of changing money hides.
• Pip: the smallest normal increment in a quote, 0.0001 for most pairs and 0.01 for pairs involving the yen. A move from 1.2800 to 1.2803 is three pips.
• Interbank or mid-market rate: the wholesale rate banks trade with each other, and the rate this converter shows.
• Major currencies: the most heavily traded, being the US dollar, euro, Japanese yen, British pound, Australian dollar, Canadian dollar, and Swiss franc. Any of them paired with the dollar is a major pair.

How to read a quote

EUR/USD 1.0866 means one euro costs 1.0866 US dollars. Flip the pair and you flip the arithmetic: USD/JPY 157.17 means one dollar costs 157.17 yen. The convention is not arbitrary. The euro, pound, Australian dollar, and New Zealand dollar are quoted with themselves as the base, while most other currencies are quoted as units per dollar, which is why a euro quote looks like a small number and a yen quote looks like a large one.

To invert a rate, divide 1 by it. If EUR/USD is 1.0866 then USD/EUR is 1 divided by 1.0866, or 0.9203. To build a cross rate between two currencies that are both quoted against the dollar, divide one by the other. That is exactly what this page does internally: every rate is stored per US dollar, and a GBP to EUR conversion is the euro rate divided by the pound rate. The Percentage Calculator is useful alongside it when you want the size of a move rather than the level.

What currency is, in one paragraph of history

Currency is anything a group of people agree to accept in exchange for goods and services, and people have been using it for at least 3,000 years. Before coins, communities settled on whatever was durable and countable: barley, salt, cowrie shells, cattle, and on the island of Yap, carved limestone discs weighing several tonnes. The first standardised coinage was struck in Lydia, in what is now Turkey, in the seventh century BC. Paper money came much later and much further east, in China, and reached European attention through travellers including Marco Polo.

Modern money is fiat money, meaning its value rests on the credibility of the government that issues it rather than on any commodity backing. Until the twentieth century most currencies were convertible into gold or silver at a fixed rate; today none of the majors are. In practice most money never takes physical form at all, existing as entries in bank ledgers and moving by card, transfer, or phone.

Cryptocurrencies work differently again, issued and verified by a distributed network rather than a central bank, with transactions recorded on a blockchain that no single party controls. They trade like currencies and are far more volatile than any of the majors, with double-digit percentage moves in a day being unremarkable. This converter covers national currencies only.

The market behind the numbers

Exchange rates come from the foreign exchange market, which is decentralised and over the counter: no central exchange, just banks and brokers dealing with each other through electronic networks. It is the largest financial market in the world, with turnover the Bank for International Settlements puts above $7 trillion a day.

It runs 24 hours a day from Sunday evening to Friday evening, following the working day around the globe from Sydney through Tokyo, London, and New York. London handles the largest share, and the busiest hours are when London and New York overlap. The most traded pairs are EUR/USD, USD/JPY, and GBP/USD. Rates move continuously during the week and stop entirely at the weekend, which is why a rate quoted on a Saturday is Friday's closing figure and why a gap sometimes appears when trading resumes.

Very little of that volume is tourists changing money. Most of it is banks trading with each other, companies converting revenue and hedging future payments, fund managers moving between markets, and central banks managing reserves. Consumer transactions are a rounding error in the total, which matters because it explains the pricing: retail providers are not competing for volume in the same market, so they can charge margins that would be unthinkable at wholesale.

What moves a rate

Thousands of variables feed into a price, but a few carry most of the weight:

• Interest rates. Money chases yield, so a central bank raising rates faster than its peers usually pulls its currency up. This is the single most watched driver, and much of the trading around it happens before the decision, on expectations.
• Inflation. A currency losing purchasing power at home tends to lose it abroad. Persistently low inflation supports a currency; high inflation erodes it.
• Trade and current account balances. A country importing far more than it exports supplies more of its own currency to the world than the world demands, which weighs on the rate.
• Politics and stability. Capital moves toward predictability. Elections, conflict, capital controls, and sudden policy changes all show up in the rate, often faster than in any other market.
• Growth and confidence. Strong economies attract investment, and investment has to be paid for in the local currency.

Not every currency floats. The Hong Kong dollar is held in a band around 7.75 to 7.85 per US dollar by its monetary authority, and several Gulf currencies are pegged outright. Pegged rates barely move for years, then move a great deal at once if the peg is abandoned.

The rate you see and the rate you get

This is the part worth understanding before you change any money. The mid-market rate on this page is a reference. Almost nobody transacts at it, because every provider builds a margin into the rate itself, on top of any fee they disclose.

Rough guide to what that margin runs at:

• Airport and hotel kiosks: commonly 7% to 15% away from mid-market, sometimes advertised as commission free, which just means the margin is entirely inside the rate.
• High street banks: typically 2% to 4% for cash.
• Debit and credit cards: the card network converts at close to wholesale, then your issuer may add a foreign transaction fee of up to about 3%. Travel-focused cards often waive it.
• Specialist transfer apps: usually the closest to mid-market, charging a visible percentage fee instead of hiding it in the rate.

There is one trap worth naming. When a foreign card machine or ATM offers to charge you in your home currency, that is dynamic currency conversion, and the exchange rate it uses is set by the merchant's processor, typically 3% to 6% worse than your own bank would give you. Always choose to be billed in the local currency. To see what an offer like that really costs, put the rate you have been quoted into the customized rate box on this page and compare the result against the live conversion above it.

Practical rules for travelling

Order any cash you need from your own bank or credit union before you leave, where rates are usually better than at the destination and there is no time pressure. Take a modest amount, enough for a taxi and the first day, then rely on cards.

Abroad, use an ATM belonging to a real bank rather than a standalone machine in a tourist strip, decline the machine's conversion offer, and withdraw larger amounts less often if your bank charges a flat fee per withdrawal. Avoid changing money at the airport unless you have no choice. Where cards are widely accepted, they are both safer and cheaper than carrying cash, provided your card does not charge a foreign transaction fee.

Leftover foreign notes can be sold back to a bank or credit union, usually at a worse rate than you bought them at, so the spread is paid twice. Coins are generally not accepted anywhere for exchange, which is a good argument for spending the change before you fly home. For working out what things actually cost while you are there, the VAT Calculator helps with tax-inclusive European pricing and the Tip Calculator handles the local convention.

Whether a currency is cheap or expensive

An exchange rate tells you nothing on its own about whether a country is expensive. Purchasing power parity is the idea that the same basket of goods should cost roughly the same everywhere once converted, and the gap between the market rate and that theoretical rate is what makes some destinations feel cheap. The Economist's Big Mac index, published since 1986, is the best known shorthand: compare the price of the same burger in two countries and you get a rough sense of whether a currency is trading above or below its purchasing power. It is a joke that turned out to be genuinely useful, and it explains why a strong currency at home can still buy an unremarkable lunch abroad.

Why this number may differ from your bank's

Three reasons, and none of them mean anyone is wrong. The rates here update once a day rather than tick by tick, so an intraday move will not appear until the next refresh. They are mid-market, while your bank quotes you a bid or an ask with its margin already applied. And the market closes at the weekend, so Saturday and Sunday show Friday's figures. For a holiday budget or an invoice estimate that is entirely adequate. For timing a large transfer, check the rate with the provider actually doing the transfer at the moment you commit. The Budget Calculator is the better place to plan the trip around the number.

Using the page

The panel gives you the conversion in both directions plus the rate and its inverse, and tells you when the rates were last refreshed and where they came from. Underneath it, the customized rate section is a separate calculator with its own result panel. It converts between an unnamed currency A and currency B at whatever rate you type, in both directions, and it ignores the live converter entirely, so a rate you enter there stays put while you change currencies above. That is what makes it useful for a kiosk quote, a contract rate agreed months ago, or any figure you want to hold still. The table at the bottom cross-references the seven major currencies against each other, which is the fastest way to sanity check a quote you have been given.